The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Pypin, Aleksandr Nikolaevich

Born Mar. 25 (Apr. 6), 1833, in Saratov; died Nov. 26 (Dec. 9), 1904, in St. Petersburg. Russian scholar, literary historian, and ethnologist. Academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1898).

The son of a member of the gentry, Pypin graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1853. In 1863 he became a staff member of the journal Sovremennik (The Contemporary), and beginning in 1867 of the journal Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe). Early in life, Pypin was influenced by the ideas of N. G. Chernyshevskii, his cousin; he later advocated moderately liberal, Enlightenment views. As a representative of the school of cultural history, he was interested in literature only as it related to the history of social thought. He wrote the fundamental works A History of Russian Literature (4th ed., vols. 1–4, 1911–13), A History of Russian Ethnology (vols. 1–4, 1890–92), and A History of Slavic Literatures (2nd ed., vols. 1–2, 1879–81, with V. D. Spasovich). These works contain a wealth of factual material, often completely original.

Pypin made a significant scholarly contribution to the study of the Old Russian tale, Freemasonry, and the literary and social movement in Russia during the first half of the 19th century.

WORKS

Ocherk literaturnoi istorii starinnykh povestei i skazok russkikh. St. Petersburg, 1857.
M. E. Saltykov: Idealizm Saltykova, zhurnal’naia deiatel’nost’ 1863–1864. St. Petersburg, 1899.
N. A. Nekrasov. St. Petersburg, 1905.
Obshchestvennoe dvizhenie v Rossii pri Aleksandre I, 4th ed. St. Petersburg, 1908.
Belinskii: Ego zhizn’i perepiska, 2nd ed., vols. 1–2. St. Petersburg, 1908.
Kharakteristiki literaturnykh mnenii ot 20-kh do 50-kh godov, 4th ed. St. Petersburg, 1909.

REFERENCES

Spisok trudov akad. A. N. Pypina. Compiled by Ia. L. Barskov. St. Petersburg, 1903.
“Piatidesiatiletie nauchno-literaturnoi deiatel’nosti A. N. Pypina.” Literaturnyi vestnik, 1903, no. 3.
Veselovskii, A. N. A. N. Pypin. St. Petersburg, 1905.
Sakulin, P. N. A. N. Pypin. Moscow, 1905.
Tkachenko, P. S. “Novye materialy o A. N. Pypine.” Russkaia literatura, 1967, no. 4.

V. I. MASLOVSKII

References in periodicals archive

In particular, he reconstructs and assesses the worldview of four significant liberal intellectuals who guided Vestnik Evropy between 1866 and 1905: Mikhail Stasiulevich, Aleksandr Pypin, Konstantin Arsen'ev, and Leonid Slonimskii.

Nineteenth-century Russian liberalism: ideals and realities

For liberals like Aleksandr Pypin, the literary historian and editor of Vestnik Evropy, the mounting attacks on the intelligentsia seemed like nothing less than obscurantism--an attack on the very principle of learning and a dangerous justification for ignorance.

(85) The intelligentsia, as Aleksandr Pypin put it, "is that portion of society to which belong scientists and writers, the best scholars, the most glorious poets.

Was the intelligentsia part of the nation? Visions of society in post-emancipation Russia